Saturday, September 16, 2006

Hinky, Hinky, Hinky

The FBI is investigating an incident in which a 75-year-old Chicago man who recently recovered from a stroke was dragged from his car by Stroger Hospital security guards.The man -- who had been waiting to pick up his wife from her job at a clinic across the street from the West Side hospital -- was roughed up enough to require medical treatment.Augustin Sotomayor was waiting in his car in a no-parking zone Monday when the armed guards approached.They ordered him to move, but also began asking about his ethnicity and citizenship, his wife told the Chicago Sun-Times. When he reached for his wallet, the guards opened the door and ripped him from the car, the wife said.Sotomayor suffered cuts and bruises and was undergoing heart tests Wednesday as his family struggled to understand why the incident happened."It was very scary," said Sotomayor's wife, Manuela, who has worked as a patient-care attendant at the Ruth Rothstein CORE Center since 1998. Like Stroger Hospital, the center is operated by Cook County government.

The first alarm bell that went off for me is, of course, the wording choices of the reporter. Will these people ever get it that they are supposed to report the story, not spin it? And, yes, sadly, that was a rhetorical question.

Was the officer supposed to treat Sotomayor differently because he was recovering from a stroke (and how, exactly, was the officer supposed to determine this by looking at him?), or are we being fed this tidbit right up front as an emotional gambit? Are we actually supposed to believe that "dragged," "roughed up" and "ripped" were the clearest, most unemotionally journalistic verbs the reporter could find?

But here's what really started my hinky bells a-janglin'...

"What the hell does someone's citizenship have to do with anything?" asked county Commissioner Roberto Maldonado, a family friend. "Dragging this old man out of his car, beating him up; I don't care what he did -- what kind of law enforcement is that?"

Hmmm. Roberto Maldonado, Cook County Commissioner. It seems to me I've read something else about that guy very recently. Jake referred to it in this post.

On September 7th Maldonado introduced a resolution to make Cook County a sanctuary for undocumented immigrants illegal aliens. Four days later, family friend Sotomayor was dragged from his vehicle and allegedly questioned about his ethnicity and citizenship? And three days after that (according to the inaccurate NBC5 story, which states that the proposal came after the Sotomayor incident plus another which will make you laugh out loud, it's so preposterous), Maldonado chaired a public hearing on the Cook County-as-sanctuary proposal, at which Sotomayor's nephew spoke.